Birdie Read Free

post office. When she found that there was a lock and a key for the mailbox, Bernice threw the whole thing on the floor of her room, enraged at her auntie’s seeming complicity in Larry’s secret-making.
    She had that mailbox with her for years, in the top corner of her closet. It was heavy and metal – if there was one made now it would be made of plastic. Bernice eventually got it down and used it for locking up her journal, wearing the key around her neck. Eventually she outgrew it.
    I’ve got bigger secrets now, I guess,
she thinks.
    Sometimes she gets mad when she thinks about that: his wife giving her a gift for secrets. Then she sometimes thinks that she should cut her some slack. There was no way, Bernice thinks, that any woman could live knowing that sort of thing and do nothing. She may have almost given up on men but she still holds a quiet place in her head for women.
    Every once in a while when she was working at Lola’s she thought about what would have happened if she’d known how to use butcher knives back then. She put that out of her head, she had to or her hands started shaking and she had to take a pull off her inhaler. Whatever those were, they usually passed pretty quick, though.
    Well, usually.
    She goes upstairs, heart pounding. Her head is cottony andher chest is too full. She tries to think of three things like they taught her in the San. Three things to calm her down. One thing she hears. The hum of the air conditioner cooling the room from the heated ovens. One thing she sees. The poster tube on the top shelf of her closet. One thing she feels. The butcher’s knife under the mattress leaving a small lump near where she sits. She does not calm down.

2
    AT HOME
    witokemakan
: one who lives with the family
pawatamowin
    She feels a caress on her cheek, a cool hand on her warm brow, and hears the gentle hoot hoot hoot of
kohkohkohow
.
*
She dreams: “Ah, so it’s night, after all.” Looking into the sleepmirror she sees talon scratches on her face.
    * A small owl.
    T HE DREAM OF THE OWL comes back four nights in a row.
    When she surfaces on the fourth morning she feels in love. Like she fell in love during the night. She can feel arms around her and thinks maybe she forgot a dream about Jesse. It feels different though – and she has had many a dream where she woke up in love with him. This warmth feels like she thinks home would feel like. Well, someone’s home, anyways.
    She remembers her mom best in the kitchen. Light feet, thick sauces and silences. Heavy sighs. It is hard to imagine Maggie as a girl going to prom in the too-big hand-me-down dress. (“That dress is too old for you,” her date had said. Admiringly and accusingly.) She is petite, bird-like, her small bones placed delicately in her daughter and hidden, early, under layer after layer of fat. Her tininess always undermined by the space she took up in the room. Or rather, by the space her spirit took up in the room. She was seemingly exhausted by the mere effort of being alive. Throw some kids, nieces, nephews and a daughter into the mix, and no matter how kind and how pure her love, they all feel the burden. Of being in the way.
    The area she takes is notional, but Bernice was always aware when she had crossed into a space coveted by Maggie. A purse filled with old chocolate bar wrappers, the candy never having made it into the home. Or worse. Nibbled when no one was around. Bernice always felt this was a betrayal, the hoarding of treats that she would never see. Never taste. It seemed to her to be unsound mothering, the keeping of a secret.
    Other secrets crawled out from under dark spaces. In arguments peppered with profanity, shooting like buckshot at the unfortunate man/men drinking nearby, Maggie yelling thatshe couldn’t stand being around all of “those damn kids.” Like Bernice hadn’t come from her body. As if Maggie’s nieces and nephews weren’t of her blood. Weren’t her responsibility.
Thosing
a wedge